Leave If You Don’t Like It

Book Project Week Four Update

What I learned this week: Repressing anger is keeping me from valuing myself

It’s always pissed me off when people say, ‘leave if you don’t like it,’ whether it’s a relationship, or a job, or a situation. As if that’s so fucking easy. Who are all these people who can so quickly cut their losses and move on? Not me.

It’s painful to hear others devalue me, when it happens. It throws me off. It’s hard to come back to center and recreate a realistic view of myself.

Leave if you don’t like it is a sentence without empathy and humanity. It’s always more complicated than that. Sometimes there is no new job waiting, no easy way to get out of the relationship, no safety net to catch you.

This year, I’ve felt undervalued in a work context. The idea that when this happens in a work situation, it’s not personal, it’s just business, is bullshit. We’re all people. We deal with each other as humans, not as anonymous parts of a business.

I was told that if I didn’t like it, I could leave. I didn’t hear it as well-meaning advice, but spite. However, the statement itself was true, although it wasn’t easy to act on, practically or emotionally.

Practically, I’d scaled other projects way down to take on this project. I had nothing to fall back on immediately.

Emotionally, my fear has always been, what if there’s no place where I will be valued? What if I’m wrong and I don’t actually deserve better? Wouldn’t it be safer to expend a bunch of energy trying to convince these people that I am valuable? The interaction fucked with my head for a long time, because my default has always been to believe other people’s opinions of me over my own.

When I’m in a personal or professional context where I feel undervalued, I often default to sadness. But what I need is anger.

Anger has a bad reputation. It scares me because I’ve been around a lot of angry, unpredictable, explosive people in my life, so I’ve tried to repress it in myself. I don’t want to hurt other people like I’ve been hurt by angry people. And also, anger can quickly turn into rage and loss of control, and control is what I’ve held onto so desperately for most of my life.

When I asked myself, why is it so hard for me to walk away when I’m being disrespected, unappreciated, or undervalued, I realized it’s because I don’t allow myself to be angry. I was sad for months. The anger never came.

Anger is activating. It’s really hard to make any moves without that activation, just stuck in passive sadness. Anger is the part of me that knows and tells me with unmistakable clarity that the way I’m being treated is unacceptable. Not being able to access that anger made it harder to see the situation clearly and take care of my needs. Anger isn’t always dangerous. Sometimes it’s protective of me. It shakes me awake when I want to pretend things are fine when they most definitely are not. Not feeling anger kept me stuck for a long time.

I’m not saying, let’s just all get angry, and that will fix the issue, or that it’s easy to use anger to activate change. I still can’t access my anger, and it’s been months. Okay, years. Okay…a lifetime.

All I can do, for now, is question my sadness and ask myself if anger would be the more appropriate emotion, even if I can’t actually feel it in my body yet. Then I try to act on that feeling that would be healthy to have in the situation. I walk away even though I’m sad to walk away.

It’s very hard to do, and I’m not good at it. But I’ve taken some steps, and a little bit of magic is happening.

I increased my rate on a government project that was awarded a couple of months back. It wasn’t that hard, because it felt like a more anonymous entity. I was still nervous about my rate getting accepted. It was.

Then I got a new writing project from a returning client. I was worried about upping my rate since our last collaboration, but did it anyway. She didn’t even blink. When she gave me the scope of work, I recommended a change. She didn’t get defensive, simply wrote back, “I trust your judgment.”

I thought it was too easy. I like this woman personally, and I respect her professionally. She gratefully pays what I tell her my services are worth and doesn’t micromanage me.

In the last eight years of writing work, I took pay cuts to get jobs that would teach me something I needed to learn. I did free work to build my portfolio and to help organizations I support. I accepted lower rates, because I thought if I proved myself, there was potential for promotions, rate increases, and more interesting work. Sometimes there was. Sometimes not.

That’s not a problem if I walk into it with eyes wide open. This isn’t just about money. But once I feel like I’m being asked to prove my value over and over, and it makes me sad instead of angry, that’s a red flag.

Finding people, places, and projects where I feel valued hasn’t been easy or fast. I have to stop all the time, asking myself: Do I deserve this? Do I get to have it? Am I open to receiving all the good things, or am I closing myself off because I’m listening to the story in my head that says I should be satisfied with crumbs?

It’s still hard fucking work. None of this stupid manifesting shit works, nothing is falling into my lap, but I’m actively working towards what I want more of in my life.

More time, more money, more appreciation, more projects I love, more work with people I enjoy, more of everything.

What made me want to quit writing my book this week:

• Feeling in the weeds with the structure of my book. I had too many other projects going, so I couldn’t stop to fix the structure, and even if I had had enough time, I didn’t know what the problem was. So I just kept writing and trying not to read back what I wrote. It was frustrating.
• Wondering if I’m ready for the near-constant emotional exhaustion that comes with writing a memoir. Running into old patterns of perfectionism and impatience, wanting to be done with the book already and have it be perfect, rather than staring into the months of deep work ahead.
• Even with the writing being difficult, I can tell that getting a taste of using my time and energy on my own work first thing every day is not satisfying me but making me want more. More time. More rest. More spilling of creative juice, however I choose. But, people, the fucking bills! Inflation! Car registration and groceries. Ugh. My adult life (and childhood, for that matter) have been marked by responsibility and maturity, and now I wish I could just sit in my fuzzy pants, eating chocolate and writing all day. Even if it’s hard, I love it so much. That sounds kinda great, but realizing how much I actually love doing it makes it harder that I can’t do it full-time. Yet.

What kept me going:

• Waking up early one morning with a clear idea of what was missing in my book structure and how to organize the overall story arc in a different way. It felt like that last puzzle piece clicking into place. I realized that what I’ve written so far isn’t wasted and was possibly the trigger for figuring out the structural issues. No writing is wasted.
• Getting an email from an online magazine I pitched a story to, saying they were still considering my pitch. I thought they had no interest, because it’s been a long time, so this gave me a tiny shard of glittery hope. Even if they end up saying no, hearing that they thought my idea was worth their time and consideration was like a surprising high-five when I needed it.
• Finishing my new website. Yes, this one. I’m obviously not a web designer, but at least I got my content updated on my internet porch.
• Presenting to a brilliant writing group, the Strayed Collective. I’d been so excited for a couple of weeks to talk to some fellow writers about what drives us to write and what keeps us from putting down words. We talked about how writing isn’t separate from us or our lives, so naturally, the conversation spanned death and chaos and community and loneliness and writer’s block and inner work and self-kindness and fears. Although I was there to offer some resources and share about my path to becoming a book coach and ghostwriter, I left filled up and positively glowing. It was an absolute fucking treat.

Week Four Stats: Finished Chapter 4, wrote 3,319 new words

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